"The original project began because we know the universe is expanding. Everybody had assumed that gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe and everything would come to a halt and collapse. The big surprise was it was actually speeding up"
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Science rarely advances with a triumphant drumroll; it advances with a quiet sentence like this, where “everybody had assumed” does the heavy lifting. Perlmutter is not just recounting a finding, he’s puncturing a cultural habit inside science: the comfort of plausibility. For decades, the intuitive story was tidy and moralistic - gravity pulls, expansion coasts, the cosmos pays its debts and collapses. It’s a narrative with a built-in ending. His wording exposes how much that ending was an aesthetic preference masquerading as expectation.
The phrase “original project” signals something even sharper: the work didn’t begin as a quest to rewrite cosmology. It began as a measurement problem, a check on the universe’s brakes. That’s the subtext scientists often downplay in public retellings: revolutions are frequently side effects of trying to be careful. The “big surprise” isn’t just acceleration; it’s that the universe refuses to behave like a commonsense object. It doesn’t slow down because it “should.” It speeds up because the data says so, even if the mechanism (later branded as dark energy) sounds like a placeholder for ignorance.
Context matters here: Perlmutter’s supernova surveys in the late 1990s helped flip a foundational assumption about cosmic fate. The rhetorical power comes from the collision between a shared prior (“everybody”) and an empirical insult (“actually speeding up”). It’s a scientist’s version of plot twist, delivered with the restraint of someone who knows the twist is real.
The phrase “original project” signals something even sharper: the work didn’t begin as a quest to rewrite cosmology. It began as a measurement problem, a check on the universe’s brakes. That’s the subtext scientists often downplay in public retellings: revolutions are frequently side effects of trying to be careful. The “big surprise” isn’t just acceleration; it’s that the universe refuses to behave like a commonsense object. It doesn’t slow down because it “should.” It speeds up because the data says so, even if the mechanism (later branded as dark energy) sounds like a placeholder for ignorance.
Context matters here: Perlmutter’s supernova surveys in the late 1990s helped flip a foundational assumption about cosmic fate. The rhetorical power comes from the collision between a shared prior (“everybody”) and an empirical insult (“actually speeding up”). It’s a scientist’s version of plot twist, delivered with the restraint of someone who knows the twist is real.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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